Chapter 1: Gravity
The ceiling was the wrong color.
That was the first concrete thought that formed in the mind of the man who used to be called Noah Kim. The second thought was the smell. It wasn't the sterile, alcohol-and-latex smell of a hospital, nor the musty, anxious smell of his own bedroom. It was the smell of old brick dust, hot asphalt outside an open window, and the faint, chemical tang of lead paint. It smelled like old New York.
Noah tried to sit up and immediately regretted the decision. His brain sloshed against the inside of his skull. A migraine split his vision into jagged prisms of light. He groaned, a sound that was guttural and unfamiliar. He was lying on a thin mattress on a creaking iron bed frame in a room that could charitably be described as a "railroad flat." The window looked out onto a fire escape and the grimy brick wall of the next building, maybe six feet away.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed. The floor was cool, uneven hardwood. He was wearing a plain grey t-shirt and sweatpants. He didn't own these clothes. He didn't own this body. Noah Kim had been a thirty-one-year-old software project manager with a bit of a paunch and glasses thick enough to stop a low-caliber bullet. When he looked at his hands, they were still his hands—calloused from typing, a small scar on the thumb from a kitchen accident in college—but they felt wrong. They felt lighter.
A newspaper was folded on a small, chipped Formica table next to a lamp with a tasseled shade. Noah reached for it. The paper was thin, cheap stock. The headline made the floor tilt beneath his feet.
THE NEW YORK BULLETIN
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
STARK INDUSTRIES CEO STILL MISSING IN AFGHANISTAN; STOCK TUMBLES 40%
Noah stared at the date. He stared at the name Stark. He had been an MCU fan since the first Iron Man trailer dropped when he was in high school. He knew this date. He knew this exact window of time. Tony Stark was currently in a cave in Kunar Province, building a suit of armor out of scrap metal and a box of scraps. The world was blissfully, ignorantly normal. And in roughly three months, a man in a metal suit would fly out of that desert and change the equation of the entire planet.
Noah stood up. His legs were steady, which was surprising. He walked to the small bathroom—a closet with a toilet, a sink with a separate hot and cold tap, and a mirror so old the silver backing was flaking off, creating dark spots like black mold on the reflection.
He looked at himself. It was him. Noah Kim. Same dark hair, same tired eyes. But there was a... clarity. A sharpness to the edges of the room that his -4.75 prescription had never allowed. He wasn't wearing contacts. He wasn't wearing glasses. He could count the individual water stains on the ceiling of the fire escape outside.
Right.
The panic was a wave of cold water starting at the base of his skull and rushing down his spine. He gripped the edges of the porcelain sink until his knuckles turned white.
I died.
He remembered the crash. The Uber. The red light. The semi-truck.
And I woke up here. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe. In 2008.
He waited for the system notification. He waited for the blue box to appear in his vision. He waited for a snarky AI voice or a status screen. He waited for five minutes, standing in that tiny bathroom, listening to the drip of the faucet and the distant wail of a police siren. Nothing happened.
"Oh, come on," he whispered to the flaking mirror. "I get isekaied into the MCU and I don't even get a Gamer power? No skill tree? No inventory? Just... rent?"
He slapped the sink in frustration. The porcelain cracked.
Noah froze. He looked at his hand. There was a tiny smear of blood on his pinky knuckle, but the sink—the heavy, 1940s-era, cast-iron-coated sink—had a six-inch crack running from the drain to the edge. A triangular piece of porcelain clattered into the basin.
He hadn't hit it that hard. He'd hit it like a normal person hits a desk in annoyance. He was a project manager. His greatest physical feat was carrying all the grocery bags in one trip.
He raised his hand slowly and pressed his index finger against the wall next to the mirror. He pushed. Not hard. Just a test. The plasterboard gave way. His finger sank into the wall up to the second knuckle as if he were pressing into a block of soft cheese. He pulled his finger out and stared at the perfect, finger-shaped hole in his wall.